Latest Phanerozoic Stories
The ancient sifrhippus, the earliest known horse, lived around 50 million years ago. It was very distinct in its appearance because it was only about the size of a modern day house cat, weighing in around 12 pounds. The horse lived in what is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a 175,000 year period where the Earth's atmospheric temperature rose by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, caused by a great release of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans. In response to the...
A strange tulip-shaped creature discovered in half-a-billion-year-old rocks had a feeding system unlike any other animal, researchers reported this week. Officially named Siphusauctum gregarium, the fossils, unearthed from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, reveal a peculiar creature roughly 7-8 inches long with a unique filter feeding system. The creature has a long stem with a bulbous cup-like structure -- similar to that of a tulip -- near the top that...
Newly launched bilingual exhibition is the world’s leading online Burgess Shale resource Toronto, Ontario (PRWEB) December 01, 2011 Today the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and Parks Canada announced the launch of the Burgess Shale online exhibition, as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada. The website provides, for the first time ever, an immersive journey into the world of the bizarre prehistoric creatures that formed the foundation for all animal life on Earth half a billion years...
A cosmic one-two punch of colossal volcanic eruptions and meteorite strikes likely caused the mass-extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period that is famous for killing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, according to two Princeton University reports that reject the prevailing theory that the extinction was caused by a single large meteorite. Princeton-led researchers found that a trail of dead plankton spanning half a million years provides a timeline that links the mass...
The Biology Magazine Eurekamag.com publishes reviews on a wide range of topics within the biological sciences. The magazine publishes 1-4 such reviews every day and the latest inclusions cover the "handy man" Homo habilis and gender discrimination aka Sexism. (PRWEB) October 27, 2011 The Science Magazine EurekaMag.com covers a wide range of topics including biology, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, geography, environment and health. Drawing from this pool of scientific...
New assessments by researchers using the latest high-tech tools to study the diets of early hominids are challenging long-held assumptions about what our ancestors ate, says a study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Arkansas. By analyzing microscopic pits and scratches on hominid teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in teeth, researchers are getting a very different picture of the diet habitats of early hominids than that painted by the physical...
More than 200 million years ago, mammals and reptiles lived in their own separate worlds on the supercontinent Pangaea, despite little geographical incentive to do so. Mammals lived in areas of twice-yearly seasonal rainfall; reptiles stayed in areas where rains came just once a year. Mammals lose more water when they excrete, and thus need water-rich environments to survive. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Aggregating nearly the entire landmass of...
A massive new fossil site discovered in southwestern China marks the first discovery of a complete ecosystem which recovered following a mass extinction.According to Guardian Science Correspondent Ian Sample, "the spectacular haul of 20,000 fossils," which was discovered at a hillside in what it now Luoping county in the Yunnan Province of China, were "beautifully preserved" and included "mollusks, sea urchins and arthropods, alongside much larger animals that...
A team made up of members of the University of Oviedo (UO) and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) have gathered together all findings of the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the reindeer in the Iberian Peninsula to show that, although in small numbers, these big mammals, prehistoric indicators of cold climates, already lived in this territory some 150,000 years ago.The presence of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), the woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), the...
Ancient man migrated out of Africa into northern Europe more than 800,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed, according to a new study released Wednesday.A collection of flint tools unearthed near Happisburgh in the eastern British county of Norfolk, where winter temperatures reach 32F degrees below zero, is from the earliest known settlement of humans, according to the landmark study published in the British journal Nature.The discovery suggests that humans 26,000 generations...
Latest Phanerozoic Reference Libraries
Thescelosaurus, meaning “godlike”, “wondrous”, or “marvelous” and “lizard” was a genus of small ornithopod dinosaur that appeared at the very end of the Late Cretaceous period in North America. It was a member of the last dinosaurian fauna before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event around 65.5 million years ago. The completeness and preservation of many of its specimens illustrate that it might have preferred to live near streams. This bipedal ornithopod is known from...
Daspletosaurus, meaning “frightful lizard” is a genus of tyrannosaurid theropod dinosaur that resided in western North America between 77 and 74 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. Fossils of the only named species were found in Alberta, although other possible species from Alberta and Montana wait for description. Daspletosaurus is closely related to the much larger and more current Tyrannosaurus. Like most of the known tyrannosaurids, it was a multi-ton bipedal...
Deinonychus is a genus of carnivorous dromaeosaurid dinosaurs. There’s one described species, Deinonychus antirrhopus. These dinosaurs, which were capable of growing to be 11 ft long, lived during the early Cretaceous Period, around 115 to 108 million years ago. Fossils have been uncovered from the U.S states of Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma, in rocks of the Cloverly Formation and Antlers Formation, though teeth that might belong to Deinonychus have been found much farther east in...
Image Caption: Head of Tenontosaurus, Institut de paléontologie humaine, Paris, France. Credit: Rémih/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) Tenontosaurus, meaning “sinew lizard”, is a genus of medium to large sized ornithopod dinosaur. The genus is known from the late Aptian to Albian ages of the middle Cretaceious period sediments of western North America, dating roughly between 115 to 108 million years ago. It was formerly thought to be a ‘hypsilophodont’, but since Hypsilophodontia is no...
The Paramyladon, an extinct genus of ground sloth, was native to North America. It lived from the Pliocene era to the Pleistocene era, a period of about 4.889 years. Remains of this creature have been found as far south as Guatemala, throughout North America, and even as far north as Alberta, Canada. Paramyladon has been easily mistaken with another ground sloth called Glossotherium, due to major similarities. Barnum Brown created the Paramyladon genus in 1903 with a species of P....
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